Americans are warming up to some of the advantages of artificial intelligence: Nearly half (47%) feel more comfortable using AI in their financial lives compared to a year ago. The shift in perception may be due to an evolving awareness of the potential AI offers to enhance daily lives — from streamlining work tasks to making financial decisions.

Still, even with this increased comfort level just 7% of Americans say they use AI-driven financial planning tools. Empower research shows that people prefer human-AI collaboration, and are more likely to trust AI-driven financial tools if they include human oversight. This may provide useful insight for business leaders looking for ways to use AI in the workplace.

Read more: Trust in technology: AI-driven personalization in consumer finance

Factors at work

While the vast majority of companies (92%) say they plan to invest more in AI over the next three years, just 1% of business leaders categorize their companies as mature in actually integrating AI into workflows.¹

This signals the need to further demystify AI in the workplace — potentially by identifying just how AI and people can be collaborative workplace partners. Such an investment could pay off: According to one study, companies that successfully implement this kind of collaboration can potentially boost their revenue by as much as 38%.²

Learning curve

Research shows that 70% of workers find purpose in their jobs.³ With this in mind, driving AI transformation in the workplace may come down to positioning AI as a tool that can complement and enhance human capabilities. This can lay the groundwork for AI to help build a more dynamic, productive, and overall satisfying workplace for people. And the potential benefits for employees embracing AI can extend beyond finding meaning in the work to reaping financial rewards as well: Data from Indeed shows that workers with generative AI skills can potentially bump up their salaries by 47%, to earn $174,727 on average.

Education is key. Empower findings show 58% of Americans use AI tools on the job in some capacity. Yet just one in six workers (15%) have received AI-specific training, revealing a clear gap between education and usage.

Read more: How artificial intelligence is making its way to the top of the corporate ladder

Greater than the sum of its parts

How can companies achieve workplace synergy between AI and people? Getting to that point is not as straightforward as simply pairing the two to work on the same tasks — it comes down to identifying the right tasks for each. In fact, according to an MIT Sloan study, human-AI collaboration is most effective when people and AI are respectively focused on the things they do better than the other.⁴

In evaluating the most effective human-AI connections, MIT researchers found mixed results. For example, in an analysis of which of the two was better at detecting fake hotel reviews, AI performed best working on its own. People who worked alone had a 55% accuracy rate while AI alone was accurate 73% of the time. The accuracy for the two working in combination was 69%.⁵

However, in another testing scenario that involved classifying images of birds, researchers found the task relied heavily on human expertise: People performed better than AI, with respective accuracy rates of 81% compared with 73%.⁶ But in this case, the two working together outperformed both working alone, achieving 90% accuracy.

A new kind of partnership

As AI continues to evolve, collaboration may become even more important. Some of the latest technology in development, agentic AI, is becoming more sophisticated than existing AI assistants. It promises capabilities like independent decision-making and reasoning skills — think AI-powered agents that can optimize supply inventories in real-time in response to demand or make automated travel arrangements.⁷ But there are nuances even to these tasks, which is why the integration of AI with the specialized knowledge and emotional intelligence of people will be so critical for success.

Developing a symbiotic relationship between people and AI at work likely will take time. Ultimately, if businesses have employees dedicated to the tasks they do best and likewise implement AI in areas where it can add the most value, it could go a long way toward achieving meaningful human-AI collaboration. And workers may not only find greater satisfaction but also may have opportunities to invest more in fostering their professional growth and human connections.

Read more: In financial planning, AI has entered the room. Where does it fit in?